Archive for September, 2010

When one of your people leaves the company / institution for another job, and that person was doing programming work that a second person in your group had expressed interest in, it is generally a poor management decision to retain the first person as a consultant (at, of course, highly inflated consultant rates) instead of moving the second person into the slot (even temporarily) to fill the need. When someone leaves a company, the separation should be complete, signing a consulting deal with the newly departed simply rewards those who leave by giving them (in effect) a doubled salary and punishes those who stay by not allowing them the career growth they have ben requesting for the past 8 months plus.

I’m not really sure how to put this, so I’ll just lay it out straight. You know how most organizations that sell computer hardware or software also sell support? Well, this is for a reason. When you’re about to buy $350,000 worth of hardware from one company, please don’t start talking about cutting out the $90,000 in support costs, purchasing no support, to throw that money at additional hardware since you already have support for some other hardware platform from some other company. Even if both hardware platforms do roughly the same thing. Just… don’t go there. Please. The people that have to make things go want to have the support in place. Really.

I’ve just discovered a problem. Specifically, something that I feel is a very major breach of basic security practices, leading to a situation where significantly confidential systems information is available publically on the internet to anyone, without need for any identification. A fairly major security vulnerability, potentially a violation of not just my workplace policies, but of certain statutes that carry significant consequences if violated.

My nightmare is thus – the individual responsible for this violation is the “fair-haired golden boy” of the group, and nigh untouchable. I have raised several issues of similar, if much lesser, import previously with both my supervisor and my boss, and have been told in no uncertain terms to “just leave well enough alone” (not an exact quote, of course).